While the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair has many components, it is CIAF 2025’s Art Fair Showcase that really turns the spotlight on current practice in Indigenous art-making, navigating the breadth of practice topics and mediums.
In just a couple of intelligently and accessibly laid out galleries – two of the reimagined fuel tanks in Cairn’s gloriously unique Tanks Art Centre – the scope of the included work ranges from ceramics to soft sculpture, painting to three-dimensional objects made from found objects and more.
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The artists run the gamut from established practitioners, like Gail Mabo and Ken Thaiday Snr, to emerging artists, some coming to their fields of practice later in life like Roy Gray from Bunda Art who, at 80, won the acquisitive Emerging Artist Award in the CIAF 2025 Arts Awards for Syricarpia Gloulifera (Turpentine/Gulumbi) in collaboration with Jo Ann Beikoff.
Unsurprisingly in a post-Voice referendum world, there are many politically charged works – and plenty of them use written text to bring their messages home more forcefully.
Art Fair Showcase: painted politics
None more so that Teneille Nuggins’ Behind the Surface (2025), which is about as unsubtle a piece of art as you could imagine. But when you consider that pretty much every single time ArtsHub posts a First Nations-related article, image or reel on social media, it’s necessary to turn off the comments in order to stem the absolute flood of racist responses that inevitably ensues.
Equally pointed and fabulously realised are ceramics from Simone Arnol and Philomena Yeatman including the Talking Heads series, which capture smug white elitism with wry humour and succinct barbs.
Utilising righteous anger rather than drollery are a group of particularly potent ceramics from Michelle Yeatman. Under One Roof highlights the many detrimental issues caused by overcrowding, with generations of First Nations people crammed into confined and inappropriate housing, and the effects this has had on health, culture and individual potential.
Navigating colonialism’s impact in a different way – through the shared culture of tea drinking – is the work of Kerry Klimm, who celebrates her family’s history of sitting down to a revitalising cuppa, but adds stark reminders of the racist world outside the security of the family home. Look twice at the tables laid with genteel and cosy tea settings, to see the embellished teacups and pots. (Klimm also hosted a masterclass during CIAF 2025 called Spilling the Tea, in which she talked about truth-telling while the participants decorated their own teacups.
Art Fair Showcase: not all ceramics
Sculptural but not ceramic, the selection of work from Dylan Sarra offers some of the most layered pieces in the exhibition, with a unique take on a particularly painful element of Queensland’s colonial history. Alongside the brightly painted boomerangs (that are both comic and poignant), gradually burned shields speaking to the erasure of violent acts during the period and expansion of the Queensland Native Police, and simple but hugely effective hessian sacks embroidered with favourite paternal phrases (Love Letters to My Dad), are two groups of handmade spears – one set tipped with hand knapped glass to reference the Queensland Native Police, the other stone-tipped representing ‘cultural continuity, collective identity and resistance rooted in Country’. Together, the spear sets speak volumes about forced roles, cultural betrayal and tools of control.
Other impressive sculptural works are the series of sharks from Ken Thaiday Snr, and various works from Erub Arts in the Torres Strait, comprising marine life created from found objects, Kyra Mancktelow’s award-winning selections, and arguably the Showcase’s most imposing and powerful carving, Offering (2025), which won the Premier’s Award for Excellence for artist Bernard Singleton and took pride of place in Tank Three, making it the very definition of a statement piece.
Art Fair Showcase: subtlety
With such a wide survey of First Nations art-making, there were also artists that seemed, on the surface at least, to be more concerned with aesthetics than polemics. But even the beautiful work of Fiona Omeenyo, with its vibrant colours and simple forms, speaks strongly to family, culture and connection to Country, while Melanie Hava’s lush paintings aim to recentre matrilineal prominence and the relationship between women and the land.
CIAF 2025 Art Fair Showcase showed at the Tanks Art Centre in Cairns from 10-13 July.
The writer visited Cairns as a guest of CIAF.
